Robert Fulford: A religion at war with itself

A religion at war with itself

At the recent Oxford Union debate, the resolution “This House Believes Islam Is a Religion of Peace” won the day by 286 to 168 votes. That seems an odd conclusion to embrace in 2013.

After the 9/11 outrage, George Bush said “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” We have to imagine that in 2001 he spoke out of hope rather than experience. Certainly we now know that nothing about Islam is that simple. Today, many of its adherents frequently express their religious beliefs through war.

The Oxford peace resolution was supported by Mehdi Hasan, a British journalist, the political editor of Huffington Post’s U.K. edition. His opponent, Anne-Marie Waters, of the National Secular Society, cited 9/11, 7/7, Mali, Somalia and other instances of war-like behaviour. Hasan argued that violence involves only a small percentage of believers and Oxford shouldn’t slander the majority and “fuel the arguments of bigots.”

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Yet Muslims are currently involved in persistent conflicts, including many Muslim vs. Muslim struggles. We know about Syria, where Muslims have killed 100,000 or more Muslims, but there are many other cases that rarely make the international news. In Nigeria, for instance, the conflicts are numerous and bloody — and usually grounded in religion.

Few people in the West have even heard of Boko Haram, a Taliban-like army that is now turning regions of northern Nigeria into hell — in the interest of converting the mostly Muslim north to its own version of Islam. Boko Haram’s name roughly translates as “Western education is sinful.” A week ago today, in pursuing their ideals, its soldiers in Yobe State attacked a boarding school for girls with guns and explosives, setting fire to the building. They killed about 42 people, mostly children.

Since it began terrorist operations in 2009, Boko Haram has been blamed for thousands of deaths. Parents in the region are reluctant to send children to school and the emergency controls imposed by the government have made ordinary business and farming difficult; the region fears a severe food shortage. Boko Haram, while violently anti-Christian, takes pride in violence against insufficiently pious Muslims, of any age. Their sin is failing to embrace Boko Haram’s puritan Wahbist view of Islam.

If Islam embodies a belief in peace, why isn’t that belief sufficient to prevent Muslims from killing other Muslims in great numbers? That question has always bothered me and I notice it also bothers Murtaza Haider, a Pakistan-born professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. He recently published an online essay, “Islam at war — with itself,” pointing out that while the nations of the West have succeeded in limiting intra-European conflicts in the last 75 years, the Muslim world in the same period has fallen into one violent conflict after another.

The worst was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, but there have been many since. For instance, in Quetta, Pakistan last month, a female terrorist, pretending to be a student, boarded a bus leaving the women’s university and detonated the explosives strapped to her body. The 28 people who died included 14 students. A sectarian terror group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which often attacks Shia civilians, claimed responsibility and proudly issued the name of the suicide bomber. Another bomb was detonated at the hospital where those injured in the bus were being treated. As Haider says, “This was all done in the name of Islam.” He imagines that the terrorists afterward “chanted with pride, Allah-u-Akbar (God is great).”

When the killing takes place entirely within the Islamic world, Muslims look elsewhere for a scapegoat, often the U.S. or India

Leaders in the Muslim world focus on conflicts where Muslims are considered the victims of others, above all Palestine. When the killing takes place entirely within the Islamic world, Muslims look elsewhere for a scapegoat, often the U.S. or India.

It’s obvious that many Muslims hope to convince themselves and the rest of the world that Islam is in essence a religion of peace. It’s also obvious that a great many other Muslims are doing their best to demonstrate that it’s not. Why?

In the closed, fearful world of Islamic discussion, this is a question considered offensive or dangerous or both. Muslims who mention it are branded disloyal. Outsiders who raise it are called Islamophobic, which is a form of bigotry in itself, an attempt to shut down controversy by intimidation.

But surely this issue deserves to be treated, for Islam’s sake and the world’s, as a question of the utmost importance.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.